Leonardo da Vinci: Paintings

please join me in welcoming Frederick ildren buongiorno [Applause] Ranjan that's pretty good you know the Red Sox are now playing at home and art and bloom is over so we can expect spring to have arrived but not quite we've got a great topic today where there's a handout which I believe you all have and this is as you know as Jesmond this is the third lecture for the course related to the exhibition upstairs of Leonardo DaVinci and the idea of beauty now that exhibition is only drawings and manuscripts but my talk today is dedicated to Leonardo as a painter now he has a fairly long life 14:52 to 1519 dies at 67 which meant that he had been eligible for Social Security for several years and he is of course most famous really in the popular imagination as a scientist expert on human anatomy of course a famous inventor bicycles and mills and even flying machines and these aspects of Leonardo tend to fascinate us today in the exhibition we have the little codex that is a bound volume on the flight of the birds from the biblioteca reality in Turin one of the treasures of the exhibition upstairs and this codex is very short little book is only 18 pages but it discusses the way that air flows over and under the wings of a bird that how the bird center of gravity is determined differences between clients and pliable feathers and stiff bones in a bird and more in this treatise even talking speculations on how one could make a flying machine in fact for extra credit this morning I'm wearing a pocket square with precisely a page from the Codex to the flight of birds on it not often when you can go to your door and find something that pertains to your topic that closely but this this book is deed more work of scientific documentation than a work of art but that's just an exhibition there is a lot of art I mean there's some very artful and beautiful drawings by Leonardo but the pages from the Codex on the flight of the bird get to the heart of Leonardo's curious and indeed restless mind he makes voluminous notes the guy is always making sketches and notes more than 5,000 pages of drawings and notes at the time of the death it's poor assistant melt see is supposed to put them all into subject order it's not easy to do particularly when it's written backwards in this mirror writing and some of Leonardo's drawings I said this is not this is although fascinating sketches not to say art whereas maybe this drawing macadamian Venice the so called vitruvian man of around 14 19 is more obviously art though it too was expressing an idea it's based on a passage in the treatise on architecture by the true vyas the ancient Roman architects writer who asserted the graceful portion proportions of the human body where the sources of classical architecture you can see indeed you've got the feet which function as the base this body is the shaft and that's the top of the head is the capital so real analogies between the proportions be human body and moreover the human Vitruvius asserted and Leonardo here draws the human head is supposed to be for an ideally proportioned body the body should be eight heads tall and another thing but Rubeus talks about in leonardo makes so vivid here is that the human body is perfect as it can be inscribed both within a square and within a circle and so there's a sense the perfect geometry in architecture is indeed comes out of our body itself now but neither of these images the slide I just showed you of the treatise on the flight the birds nor the Vitruvian Man here on the screen are paintings and they're not even related to paintings but these works make clear challenge today as we think about laying out of the painter because it's hard to kind of remember recognize Leonardo the painter so our goal this morning in a way is to rescue Leonardo from his popular reputation as a bizarre inventor or an off-kilter wizard perhaps and this is a get difficult task given the way we think about Leonardo and the way indeed he talked about itself so I want to just play this out a little bit more and talk about a famous letter around 1480 148 1482 from leonardo to Ludovico Sforza who's the the rulers Milan and this letter makes clear Leonardo's wide-ranging talent talent he's essentially a polymath do a bit of everything and boy is he proud of that but this letter okay it's not just any old letter if a combination CV and cover letter he's trying to get a job and he's making clear that he can do just about anything now bear with me I'm going to read part of this letter hopefully part of the letter out loud but to make it easier for you I've give you an outline of the topics there are ten topics plus a postscript each one of these is a skill that Leonardo asserts he has mastered and interestingly it's almost entirely military engineering so there are topics right there so then it explains a little bit of sorts of one topic abridges I have plans for very light strong and easily portable bridges with which to pursue and on some occasions flee the enemy and others sturdy and indestructible these are bridges fill either by fire in battle or battle easy and convenient to lift and place in position also means of burning and destroying those bridges of the enemy that's topic one now too I know how in the course of the siege of a terrain to remove water from the moats and how to make an infinite number of bridges Manta lots and scaling ladders and other instruments necessary for such an enterprise three also if one cannot when besieging a terrain proceed by bombardment either because the height of the slope or the strength of its situation and location I have methods for destroying every fortress or other stronghold unless it has been founded upon a rock for I also have types of cannons most convenient easily portable with which to hurl small stones almost like a hail stone and the smoke from the cannon will instill a great fear in the enemy on account of grave damage and confusion so kind of psychological warfare - we go into five now also I've means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages constructed completely without noise even if it should be necessary to pass underneath moats or any river 6 also I will make covered vehicles safe and unassailable which will penetrate enemy and their artillery there's no host of armed men so great that they would not break through it and then seven I should also should the need arise I will make cannon mortar and light ordnance a very beautiful and functional design it's nice to know that 8 where cannon is impractical impractical I will assemble catapult manga Nell's try buckets and other instruments of wonderful efficiency 9 and should see battle be occasioned I have examples of many instruments which are highly suitable either an attack or defense 10 he says in time of peace I believe I can give us complete satisfaction as any other in the field of architecture so times of peace that's time for building not for waging war and the construction of both public and private buildings of public being churches and monasteries and government buildings and private buildings like a palace or home usually said also I can conduct water from one place to another so locks and canals and then in a kind of PS he says also I can execute sculpture and marble bronze and clay likewise in paintings I can do everything possible as well as any other whoever he may be so that's quite a list first you can see all aspects of military engineering but the painting aspect comes in as a postscript and of course that military of course was the highest of really all the arts that kind of combined everything and something completely practical for a despotic ruler like Ludovico Sforza who really wanted to be sure that he would be well protected indeed he is kicked out by the French later on but military engineering is indeed key to things in Leonardo is making clear that he understands all these different aspects but then he relates in then to art seems a little funny but that was not what he thought his first employment in Milan would be to get out of Florence he wanted to do so he wanted to serve in a court we could be paid a retainer not have to worry so much about the next commission and indeed the life of the court suited him and so he goes you know around the time of this letter maybe soon after to Milan now Leonor is lecture his list right here and in the letter eleven points comes off like bragging initially except you realized that he probably could do all these things there right it's not bragging if you can back it up and he could at least start them though he often didn't finish a project and in terms of painting although he began dozens of projects four paintings very few or completed so in that context of very few completed paintings let's take a first look at one of the drawings in the exhibition you see it there beautiful pale image on the screen to cover the catalog it's been reproduced a lot and indeed it is a spectacular sheet one worth spending a lot of time it's the sort of drawing that if you feel like you're standing in front of it too long and drawing driving nuts the people who are behind you take a pause go back not only with the other people in the gallery but your eyes will be grateful for a little break to then study it again with even more intensity this done around 14 d3 and this is a drawing metal points as you've learned in this course metal point is using the tip of a wire held in the stylus the wire usually silver on prepared paper where the toothed edge of this coated paper picks up tiny fragments of the of the silver to make this beautiful strong and even line notice how the hatching which is these parallel lines and of course done from the point of view not of a right-handed person but of a left-handed person all those lines going down the side of the head on the shoulder these hatchings these parallel lines to create line and volume done with amazing uniformity real remarkable even pressure of each line and also the I think amazing contrast between the very steady lines here and then the super loose and very free squiggled at the right which suggests the angels hair so this is a wonderful drawing but part of what makes it's wonderful it's not so much what's drawn on the sheet it's what's not on the sheet you notice there's lots of blank paper no real description of a background the body doesn't sort of stop evenly you know at the neck or the shoulders there are lots of the forms light even the contours of the face are just barely suggested they're implied not spelled out and the great connoisseur Bernard Berenson wrote in 1903 quote said this is one of the finest achievements in all draftsmanship that's a pretty strong statement and it's a fascinating thing you realize that sense of psychology because you're tugged between and I an individual person presumably drawn from a model at least begun from a model but then it's been carefully refined and reworked to achieve and idealized even divine angelic form now this drawing was not made as independent work of art and nor despite its credible quality and achievement it was simply study towards a you know it's re it's it's not independent work of art notice by its achievement it was not just part of Leonardo's ongoing practice as a scientist in a way trying to analyze and determine what is beauty how can you investigate beauty and that's indeed one of the subjects of the exhibition upstairs rather this particular drawing was made specifically as a study towards the painting a commissioned Bentley and our doe had once he gets to Milan and the supports as you know is typical working practice in the Italian Renaissance that that is this is what he would have learned growing up in the studio baroque EO famous sculptor and painter in Florence his teacher and that is an artist would before getting to the tricky part of a painting first study carefully individual D particularly heads hands complex drapery patterns all of these were to be determined in advance before you picked up a brush you wanted to figure out those complicated things where the fall of light would be how exactly was something posed and this is the way you would do things very carefully so much of the thinking had been done before you got to your panel or canvas and this beautiful drawing here is in fact study for the head of a angel here at the right of of this altarpiece of the virgin of the rocks-- now in the loo there's a contract Leonardo takes in 1483 so soon after arriving in Milan and with two helpers who are named on this and Leonardo took the drawing which we saw on the screen and which is upstairs in the exhibition and to use that to create the head of the angels who then points with its hand over here at John the Baptist who's at the left of the composition now we'll return to this painting a little later during our brief chronological survey of Leonardo's paintings but for now it's important to recognize that many drawings from Leonardo's hands cannot be matched up with a painting that is there's no correspondence and sometimes they can't even be matched up with a sculpture and sculpture and Leonardo is the subject of next week's lecture with the MFA's expert on a European sculpture Merida temporary but many drawings that survived from Leonardo's hand seem to be Commission's that didn't get finished or just initial explorations of human figures detailed Anatomy poses without any clear purpose that is he didn't have a specific painting in mind he was working on them to indeed investigate the human body at rest and in motion all the kind of details but always pursuing psychological insight and the beauty of the human body as goals idealize in them as well so this is one of the the keys to our the challenge of thinking about Leonardo as a painter that is hundreds of evidently preparatory drawings they seem that they should be for something apparently for paintings but there are very few so hiding paintings lien artists over is in fact tiny by the way there's the angel there and you can just see he's made a number of differences as well as a difference of angle we're now looking down a bit but the angel here is clearly based on the drawing in the exhibition so this little mosaic shows a sort of all of the best candidates of Leonardo's paintings together only about 16 or so paintings and some of them are disputed that is certainly an order experts doubt they're actually by his hand and think they're by a follower or an workshop assistant or in some cases they're completed by others some paintings are unfinished you can see those brown ones here they've just the first layer to the underdrawing and some of the under painting the dividing darkness and shade has been added but now the coloring of the full three-dimensional modeling some paintings are nearly ruined some may be copies by another artist after an original by Leonardo and some experts would say they're only about ten paintings by Leonardo that are fully by Leonardo that survived so you can see it's quite difficult and because the over is small people can spend a lot of time getting very particular trying to wonder which version for example sometimes there's more than one of something that survives which is closest to Leonardo or could it be lastly an art of self they often go back again and again to drawings and making comparisons between drawings and paintings so in that sense it's kind of false to separate drawings and paintings but because this was what he was trained to do as a painter before any of this military science or other flights of fancy and adventure that it does make worthy subjects for lecture so now with this group of paintings some of them are large most of them pretty small though the kind of scale an individual artist would do alone a single panel painting right an old portrait or something that you would do without the aid of assistance much they would of course you know ground your pigments for you help to mix paintings clean the brushes but the actual thinking was generally done by the master except in bigger compositions when you delegate portions so this is all a Leonardo he makes Vermeer who's got 32 or 33 paintings look like mr. prolific in comparison and so that's quite something if you think about this incredibly influential artist who has very few surviving paintings and again a number of them finished by others or indeed left incomplete now lay on our contemporary Botticelli has at least 150 hundred seventy paintings so probably four or five screens like this many of them in excellent condition and we know that Botticelli in the end of his life in a kind of fit of religious fervor indeed wanted to burn some of his secular paintings and so Botticelli there's still many of them around and that just shows that he was someone that worked steadily you had to delegate well produced very efficiently laying out or though could not let go in many cases he wanted to keep working on something and doing it again and again and return to it and in fact if you look at the chronology on the the back of your handout you'll notice there's a lot of about dates sometimes we have a commissioned date but we don't know when it gets done or it doesn't get done other cases we know when something's finished but not really want it's begun and so these dates are very approximate and they're really to be taken with a grain of salt and that's it's frustrating of course to think about that but Leonardo as a painter some of these were suffered prolonged execution he would start it even work on it then he would sort of bitter or change his mind or take something else up it's as if the ideas in his head were more beautiful than anything that he could execute despite his amazing quality as a draftsman and as a painter then let's pause for a moment before we start our survey and look at one of the best drawings in exhibition upstairs this is the old man and a youth in facing profile it's done in red chalk on paper and Leonardo was a real pioneer in red chalk he loved the total effects you get and indeed it's much more convincing in effect in a way for conveying skin tone than white or black chalk and we have on the right this gorgeous young man or a great example of youthful beauty contrasted with an old man who is very different features he's a little gnarly craggy not particularly sympathetic there are dignified old men this missus isn't really one of them but it's fascinating it says a lot about Leonardo that he would not do this on two separate sheets but once he drawn the first one then draw the second one and really but think about these as opposites and even in a drawing like this this remember this is closer to art than treatises on flying or birds and movement of water at cetera we can see in something like this drawing layers dry for experimentation his way that he ponders extremes to ends of life's journey kind of beginning and end and sets them up as opposites and this is a when looking this drawing this is great quotation from Leonardo's own writing where he indicated said quote opposites produce strong contrast with one another and all the more so when they're very close together that is the ugly next to the beautiful the big to the small the old to the young the strong to the weak so he's thinking in terms of contrast and indeed one of the best ways rhetorically to make any kind of point of courses to show its opposite or show on the other hand rather instead by contrast and this is way that he seems to naturally think and comes out in many of his most beautiful drawings but such effort in these two drawings and all the effort that goes into it mentally it's not preparatory for painting we should note and this leads us to another kind of contrast or be the even our minds of paradox even as Leonardo's Restless activity as a scientist and his endless doodles as a draftsman make it hard to discern clearly what he was doing as a painter that is they kind of swamped as achievement as a painter because there's just so many other drawings and scientific illustrations his particular scientific bent his skill in creating drawings there was offer us an important lens to understand his paintings that is by seeing the scientist the inventor and the draftsman within the paintings try to get into his frame of references frame of his mind we are afforded entree into how leonardo thought indeed he's never just a pure painter there's always something as a scientist and the inventor within so the back of the handout again it starts with a key dates those are the rough outline of Leonardo's life and is born April 15th and 15 1452 in the town of Vinci and Vinci is a sort of big village that's 45 minutes west of Florence now if you look on the front of the handout you'll see under da Vinci da Vinci is not a last name and you will be doing a great service for for the the Italian language and culture way into the future not to refer to the artist as DaVinci he's only called Leonardo da Vinci with the voice from not a last name just like the courageous 15th century young French woman who rallied the troops and defeated English in the Hundred Years War she's never called of Arc she's Joan so that that's our analogy after Leonardo's he was you know born in 1452 probably in 1469 he is apprentice to Andrea del Verrocchio who was a very gifted artist in a range of media he was a goldsmith did sculpture in bronze marble terracotta decorations and stones and metal and painting so ran a big workshop taught major people in that workshop including para Gino and Verrocchio's emphasis on strong contours flowing shapes and in his paintings these figures seem to dominate their settings and this is a wonderful example because it's not just it's a fine band by Pharrell kyo but it's also one with this couple interventions by the Leonardo so I said they've got strong contours you see that here particularly in this baptism the edges of the body kind of wiry and strong I'm very confident of the body of Christ in the middle the Baptist at the right the figures do dominate their settings there's a hard edge almost is it the forms are sculpted the carved not sort of softly painted and this is important to keep in mind if this is the baseline this is the kind of style that Leonardo begins with with hard edges right it'll kind of painted also that's mostly in tempera that's using egg yolk egg yolk if you'd having a plate of fried eggs right and the egg yolk sort of sits it dries it's very hard very quickly you mix the pigment with that it dries quickly it's capable right pastel colors and dries quickly oil by contrast takes its time to set one lane that is coming into use right in the 14 60 70s and 80 so it's Leonardo as a as an apprentice artist and as a young artist and boy does he love the afford the way that the slow drawing oil affords more experimentation you can make changes because it's not set yet but of course Leonardo indeed does this as soon as he can do this with all media and sometimes to its detriment and so Leonardo is one of the assistants he seems to been particularly adapted painting and Verrocchio's probably granted him one of the specialist specialties an artist within a workshop one person would do landscape one person might do rains and might do the sculpture in marble somewhat specialized in bronze so they had different tasks and you can imagine this as different kinds of chefs perhaps in a restaurant in your pastry chef your line cooks and some people don't get very far and have to keep washing dishes so it's a kind of division of labour now but done all under the ages and they watch it watchful eye of the master himself Rocio in this case now in 1472 about three years after Leonardo is goes in the Verrocchio's studio Leonardo then is admitted the painters guild which is the guild of st. Luke's but it seems to continue working for a few more years within baroque Rios studio Sween kind of has this union card but it's continuing to work in part because you got better come you've got better commissions that way yeah Viroqua was a known quantity to work under him would allow to work on major commissions and not have to make your way trying to look usually for smaller things for private individuals but you could do one of the great things possible which is due to an altarpiece in the church now so this painting now in mio feeds the influence now I've never like the hands of God up above they're done by yet another assistant presumably and this tree looks oddly rubbery kind of almost done by a elementary school student it's frankly awkward you know did another pupal pupil but the distant landscape and even it's hard to see in a slide but it sort of there's a wonderful sense of atmosphere and distance of haze in the foreground clouds and the distance how the very sharp forms and the mountains at the far back are bit indeed been softened through all the layers of atmosphere before our eyes and that's likely by leonardo and the two main figures the standing figures John the Baptist very earnest reaching in to pour the water over the head of Christ and then Christ's head eyes cast down humble receiving this the water on his head praying fervently as if he understands that this is the beginning of his mission those are done fine figures done by my Verrocchio's also typical of Verrocchio's worked as the pyramidal structure right it's a big triangular they're mostly composed of the two main figures the standing ones but also completed by the two angels at the lower left now let's look more closely at these two angels and you can see in this detail the focus of course is obviously on the head the bodies go back a second the bodies actually there's a lot of detail but it's hard in the draper fold but it's hard to actually see imagine where the bodies would be under that this is a kind of big voluminous bravery and we should note of course as well upstairs in the exhibition there are some beautiful drapery studies bizarre II was the great biographer of Renaissance artists he says that let specifically describes Leonardo's working practice saying Leonardo would make clay figures basically little mannequins and then drape them with soft rags dipped in plaster and this plaster would keep the shape of the folds right so dry you have quite beautiful folds like you see there at the bottom left and then Leonardo would study these in drawings made with a brush that's interesting not Bronk not that is with a pen but with a brush which is already saying these thinking about how this would look in a painting but if we go to the faces again the detail from the bottom left the one on the right okay this is clearly painted by a ver okiya it's in tempera and that it's using eggs not oil we see the confident outline of the face it's kind of beautifully done it's a nice angle to it nice effects of light on on the cheekbones the sockets of the eyes the hair above that kind of curls down in the center coming to a central point in the middle of its forehead and this is by Viroqua who's the master of the shop and the main painter here but compare that to the one on the left it's an amazing exercise but the one as pretty as the one on the right is the one on the left is at a whole other level of achievement and indeed psychological depth it's a whole ideal up in beauty in fact it's like a number of the drawings and exhibition the kinds of ideas that Li use that Leonardo made frequently particularly impressive are the marvelous flowing locks look at these come down and they're caught with just very delicate highlights that mark where the light hits that not in the troughs of the curls right on top and the crests of the curls and they're so dynamic they don't think they don't kind of move in a kind of boring braid or straight lines indeed they have so much energy to them and certainly they remind us of the studies that Leonardo made a movement of water we have waves and channels going into each other currents mixing and rippling and also the twist in the neck of the figure you can see the this angel here though the tension there in the neck gives a whole dynamism to the corner of the of that picture also compare the two you've got you know this this angel on the rive rock is Angel's charming but almost knows but something more beautiful is right on his right you know are left as because this angel on the left is engaged in a kind of rapture is sort of unders is getting it it's understanding comprehending fully we might say what happening to Jesus in the baptism that is it's a spiritual cleansing which is ushering in Christ's earthly mission now Verrocchio's means true I write and that's the kind of a wonderful name to have if you're an artist and though and you can see in a way that although Leonardo clearly had the better eye it was more perceptive Justin could execute what he saw with greater fluency than any artist before him it does say something about Verrocchio's that he had his own sense of good taste of a Rocio a good eye and that he knew when to back off and let his pupil run with it just head off ahead now this is the Annunciation a painting that's been much debated but the thinking now seems to be that it's almost entirely Leonardo there it's been repainted in touch in certain ways we know nothing about early history strong horizontal format so not likely to be an altarpiece it's pretty small too in the sense about this big so it wouldn't necessarily go into Church maybe in a private home we know nothing about it until it enters the Offit's II in 1867 and it's called Leonardo then it was probably painted out in Rocio studio and the amazing lectern you know as nice as this lectern is right here won't it be fun to be sitting at that one this is a remarkable thing where you've got the claws of animals below amazing wings coming up architectural volumes scallop shells big Garland's as if it's all done in marble and this is indeed very much the house style of ver elcio and you'll hear more about that some of rocio's work and we'll how that influenced Leonardo in the lectures next week but the contrast this is so this is Leonardo learning from the house style the kind of sculpture because his boss the rock who executed tombs and other architectural detailing things are you needed very beautiful carving but also it's important it's not just fancy there is an inherent sense of movement there's such great energy in those forms right there but the Moody just landscape completely Leonardo very beautiful and in fact right around the same time around 1473 is Leonardo's first dated work which is the study of a Tuscan landscape with a storm coming on so around this we believe the same time as this was painted now it's a masterly composition you can see it's unequally divided one third is for the Virgin she kind of gets this section and of course she is protected by this building she's sitting at the selection outside I can't see the chair but it's covered with beautiful drape you fold and she's in this kind of niche formed by the by the corner of the building and notice also that her legs also open up and in her hand is out too so her body is reflecting very subtly the space behind her there's a sense of being in close she's receiving this great news the surprising news brought by the angel but she also is in somewhat enclosed somewhat sheltered and indeed sure so one third for the Virgin here two thirds for the angel here devoted to this beautiful variety of nature right there is a kind of meadow or a lawn here perhaps with beautiful flowers in it done with real painstaking attention then further lawn through the wall here there's an opening right there notice the opening here in this wall and then it's occur a path it goes back to various trees including poplars and then different view of mountains in the bay in the background but notice again the subtlety the careful way that Leonardo almost scientifically plots this composition so that there is a break in the wall jest where the gesture of blessing and announcing comes with the angel it's a beautiful touch there it really draws your attention to that and so indeed the angels been set right in the break in the wall in order to emphasize this in his mission and indeed it's a nicely contrast with the figure of the Virgin right there the beautiful despite the strong geometry indeed it feels very much plainer this painting happens in stages a bit like the play right they go back on the stage there's a wonderful flow of left to right as he announces what's happening she is going to bear the son of God and she keeps her hands on her reading and then raises the right hand with the left hand raises it up in understanding acknowledgment of what is what is happening and there's just lightness and transparency throughout is extremely truly impressive performance and very similar to the Angels head we saw just a minute ago and the lively strong confident drapery in Leonardo's section of the baptism of Christ begun by his teacher just a little bit later is this painting some jenever to Ben Sheen this is the only Leonardo DaVinci color painting that we all agree on that is in North America she Ginevra was the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker and reporter was probably commissioned around the time of her marriage at age 16 and Leonardo the painter was only about six years older and you should pay particular attention to the modeling in this there's a great sense of three dimensionality and this is created through veils of smoky shadow and imperceptible gradations not by strong lines so we're ready he's leaving behind the model of his teacher Verrocchio's Florentine style I'm having sort of strong winery contours so they're not abrupt transitions of color light but rather imperceptible gradations it's hard to mark exactly where the face stops and the hair begins or the or the air around that volume begins and from your hand out again there's the definition of school motto Leonardo really invents this idea su motto mean smoked or smoky and to method Leonardo events to model figures and three dimensions through imperceptible gradations from light to dark and he develops is considerably furthered as later paintings where the figures are even better inserted into a moody rich atmosphere you can almost feel the kind of heavy air but even as a young artist here he is he is making real strides and a new kind of art also new here is that landowners put the figure in front of a landscape she's off sensibly outdoors and most Florentine women Italian women were supposedly kept indoors that's that they could be watched they needed they were not given much agency or independence and women were mostly shown carefully sheltered within the walls of a home and the outside world could the plication will be there but as a window here she's right in front of the landscape so it's a very different presentation also the 3/4 post she's not facing straight out and she's not in profile right profile is the oldest kind of Renaissance portraits because they have a certain authority from ancient Roman coins where the rulers were put in profile but a profile portrait is really the person the sitter doesn't look back at us and in a way sub subservient or submissive to the gaze of the viewer of the portrait looking threat straight on it's kind of awkward but this three-quarter view where her body and header subtly turned much more interesting psychologically you feel that she has a real presence and indeed to doing 3/4 portrait was pretty new an Italian art for both portraits of men and of women and her face is beautifully framed by the tree behind her now the tree would have been much greener Green is a color you need to keep in mind with oil paints green often turns to brown through age in fact generally the oil paints darker colors get darker and darker I mean in all those Rembrandt portraits people are wearing Browns and blues that look like black and all the Browns can tend to in all those hats and Rembrandt portraits for example can tend to look black as they just sink in color by contrast white stay bright white so the total balance gets off you get white stay very white and some of the darker colors just get even further dark so this would have been around her head a brighter green and in fact that spiky Bush is a juniper bush and juniper refers to chastity it's an emblem of that which is the greatest virtue of a renaissance woman but also it's a pun on her name juniper the Italian word for juniper is Janeiro and her name is Giovanna so it's a nice kind of pun on her name as well and sometime in the past probably because of damage to the bottom edge it was cut um and it would have in fact shown her hands and there is a surviving drawing extremely beautiful in Windsor that probably seems to be very likely that these would be her hand and that also explains a little better the turn of her body that she's kind of in effect cradling empty air to make a very expressive gesture with her two hands that kind of echo each other and they also shows the holding a small sprig maybe a carnation again flower commonly used in ransoms portraits to symbolize virtue or devotion so here we have a beautiful early painting where the Annunciation but he's still figuring things out a very competent portrait here but indeed it's damaged and missing some of its nicest features that would have looked like this and then the next one in our list chronologically is very tough to figure out because it's a sense it's almost completely unfinished it's just really sketched out under painting you see right there as far as it gets so this is the gun in 1481 so and these as you know this is not long before the time of that pleading letter that kind of amazing curriculum vitae that he sent to Ludovico Sforza and the lack of success in this painting which is evident on its very surface it's one of the reasons he might have thought he wanted to get out of Florence it was the gun unfortunate he won for the monastery of San Donato scope 800 just outside the city walls of Florence but it's left incomplete when he leaves from Milan and it's the adoration of the Magi it's an extraordinary crowd scene now the procession of the three kings is a common one in Renaissance art and there's the great ie one a big retinue right it's not just the three kings they had they had all sorts of Entourage and retainers and part of the deal the subject matter is to show a lot of variety right all these fancy people and they're literally getting off their high horse and they're bowing down to this child who was born in a kind of ruined barn placed in a manger really expresses an amazing contrast right there something that Leonardo would have loved with his preference for contrast like offering their gifts to this improbable son of God but this painting goes much further it is an enormous crowd seen them and you can see throughout Leonardo's really working even in these sort of ghostly shadows trying to pay attention to varieties of human expression he is trying to say how do you depict wonderment or confusion or all or anger or religious ecstasy how do you convey those things the done primarily the facial expressions of course and gestures and he is making clear that painting like this that he is trying to convey the state of a figures mind through the pose the gesture and expression and he does something very scientific about this right he's it's like you've been working out so many different possibilities he doesn't want to miss the opportunity once a cram them all into this painting and Leonardo recommends in his notebooks which would have been had he gotten it done a very thorough treatise on painting and the bits of this got out to other artists but it was really only studied fully a couple centuries later but in his treatise he discovers purported treatises future treatise on painting he recommends that artists should observe death people because they employ gestures with great skill Leonardo says quote they express themselves better in this way than any other group of human beings so the point thing in a painting which cannot talk how do you convey emotion while you do it through facial expression you do it through gestures and poses so he's really working at a whole range of things here and there is an extraordinary though I think frankly distracting background a big kind of rocío tree but then dozens of figures and there's horses which seem to be in a kind of combat and horses are one of the recurring interests as you see in drawings in exhibition and our loved horses and sound my nobility and an energy even greater of course than people there's in the background so there's horses here and here and then there's this extraordinary stare it's kind of useful at staircases that want to ruin the building that seemed more of an exercise in perspective than any sort of logical setting for the scene but a real feeling of horror vacui though that Leonardo wishes to fill everything up he kind of wants to get as much mileage out of everything he's been thinking about all of the drawings been making in the last few years and wants to cram that into this picture and we can sympathize with his impulse right he's done all that work don't you want to get credit for it but it doesn't really make for a great painting and he evidently agreed because he left this painting unfinished and goes to Milan indeed the poor monks had waited quite a while they assumed that they waited a whole decade before they conditioned another painting from so another artist they hoped that he would come back and bring this to some completion so in Milan early on he paints a complete and finished masterpiece this is the virgin of the rocks-- that we looked at a little earlier it's in the Louvre though not in Milan and indeed the provenance that is history of ownership of Leonardo works is often very indicative it was pink for the compa charity of the Immaculate Conception in the church of san francesco el grande in milan and it's hard to see through a thick varnish indeed everything is much yellower than it should be varnish is a kind of resin coating that protects a painting from scratches and insects and such and it also unifies the colors it brings them out into a greater saturation and this painting is under a very thick varnish because varnish which is darkened with age one of the problem the good thing is it does protect the painting does saturate the colors and gives you you know beautiful rich reds and beautiful greens and blues but varnish also with time can discolor becomes the kind of prism you're looking through that's hard to see also can discolor unevenly and shouldn't really warp the overall effect of a painting so it's hard to see this picture even if you hear the Louvre you know you period it it is tough now in this painting though to a much greater extent than the unfinished adoration the major we have a harmony between the background and the figures the forms echo each other but it's not too obvious then it's a kind of wonderful thing because you read these shapes here this these extraordinary geological formations here big massive rocks that are verticals that seem to lean against each other there's various foliage you read them both two dimensionally that is it's kind of it's a kind of crowning formation here right above these figures but also something that is in deep depth it's very far back and they in the sense they function as a kind of architectural decoration think of a fancy spiky niche in a gothic building it's kind of think ways encloses them in a beautiful way without being though too obvious now the central figures constitute a strong pyramid and this is completely Florentine practice right make a strong pyramid right here he would have brought this with him to Milan and then it's wonderful to the gestures are so beautiful look how the Virgin holds with her right hand the back of the infant John the Baptist who is in fact cousin of Christ and then the angel right looks out but then points for this figure and finger at the Baptist there and this if you look a little closer realize it's just a very beautiful network of gazes right Virgin Mary looks down at her son the cousin John the Baptist looks at his cousin he's blessing in return this angel looks out I mean it's the jewels of this the network of gazes indeed makes the geometry of the pyramid all more tight and effective now the angel right of course is based on the superb drawing we looked at earlier that's up in the exhibition and it's also interesting though that Leonardo picks an angel air more logically you would have another adult figure that would play off the Virgin would probably be Saint Elizabeth who's the mother st. John the Baptist or maybe even Elizabeth Mary's own mother Saint Anne if we had more time there are a number of very important paintings that relate to unfinished one and then a cartoon that is a full-scale preparatory drawing developed this idea of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Baptist but later are choosen to put an angel here perhaps is a sensible beauty and also is a kind of psychological insight that maybe it takes something divine really to recognize the mission of Christ and the role of the Baptist's remember the Baptist just like Christ goes to the crucifixion the Baptist is later beheaded and we'll get to that at the end of this talk now also another interesting thing of course is that the angel the write is very feminine angels are supposed to be sexless they don't have a gender though in Italian use its Angela what's a masculine word and angels have masculine male names right Gabriel wrathful etc but Linares are particularly feminine not in Rajasthan much as female and this complex network of gazes the beautiful poses butyl and also the amazing senses look at the foreshortening of mary's left hand coming right out at us the way of rendering on a two-dimensional surface great three-dimensional depth done with such skill we both ponder the mystery of Christ as we ponder the amazing achievement of this painting it's a kind of simultaneous problem these figures inspire us as both to the mystery of art and the mystery of God but it's also fascinating this painting although complete and very beautiful was never delivered and it's kept by Leonardo in fact and it was taken to France and last part of his life and then given to the French royal collection at his death and then later finds its way into the loo and always suffered in comparison to this picture is this one here which has been seen until recently as a much less important painting which is done probably in two different campaigns and we definitely done in two campaigns but one day exactly begin an end it's hard to say it's where's the previous painting is a beautiful ineffable quality amazing somato this one by contrasting is a lot harder beautiful but still hard as if everything's been you know sort of stony or polished up to a great Sheen and so you've got a weird comparison you've got a painting that seems very hard but it's been beautifully cleaned and then and then the one that's in London National Gallery the other one complete earlier but also under very thick varnish so it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison now but then against also changes of taste to some people that seems to be lacking subtlety right other people know it's confident and strong the painting is very varied in treatment when applying a long protracted working process you know there's different materials being used and different ways of forming the figures and this painting is what was evident evidently provided to the Confraternity eventually right the people the commissioners finally got this painting rather than the other one which Leonardo wanted to hang on to then this comes after much litigation between Leonardo and the commissioners or the patron so complicated thing but that he was willing to let this one go may not speak in favor of its authorship and indeed the standard view until that five or six years ago was that this was a later work mostly by assistants but recent technical investigations have found a working process consistent with Leonardo himself more than his followers and particularly pentimenti which is changes while in progress he did a lot of changes if you just assigned one of your workshop assistants even your best one to make a copy you wouldn't make changes while you're going through it and there's one big difference of course the angel here is not pointing with the right hand otherwise the composition is fairly similar so the face has changed a little bit and so this new argument has been made that indeed this painting a substantial Leonardo but because of its protracted working process is is different in final appearance and the head of the angel this section has always been among the most admired of the painting and I think it is quite extraordinary even if it does seem a little stiffer or more serious and less diaphanous as the painting it's kind of part in the loop it's a beautiful thing and look at the way that the hair falls down in the most beautiful organic way like rushing water again this is the scientists mind at work very similar to the angel that he inserts of the young artists into the baptism begun by his master burro Keo and so in the last few years this painting has been reconsidered in the spot by certain experts particularly ones in London at the National Gallery to be substantially spied Leonardo now short of between these paintings he paints this which is one of his great portraits to chila kalarani also known as the lady with an ermine so it's kind of an it's an animal that you'd you know make fur coats out of but it's also an emblem of purity and evidently a pet it's a beautiful painting it's we know that kind of woods we can say all on walnut typically we just have to say oil on water oil on panel but look at the attention first at her hand again this is a beautiful hand but it's also the hand of someone that knows Anatomy so well and you can it's just remarkable look at the way the light catches the knuckles or the somato effect that is not having a strong contours very confident but using an imperceptible smoky shading to make this seem as palpable and realistic in three dimensions as possible it's a fabulous hand and then also notice the hand is also kind of nicely curved a bit like a paw and indeed you've got a curved kind of Paul there and there is a wonderful sense of echo between the human form and the charming animal but also notice how that the this woman young woman who was the mistress of Ludovico Sforza the recipient of that bragging letter she is a beautiful curve to her body much further turned than in the jenever de banshee portrait and in contrast that portrait despite its exterior setting seems pretty conventional this not much later is so much more dynamic wonderful curve in her body and then even more so in the ermine see that amazing twist Mirman makes you think long before watson and crick of the sort of double helix right of DNA there's so much energy in that and there's also of course a sense of energy perception of being inquisitive fascinated with the world but also pure extremely appealing quantity in a pet and of course in a mistress and it's a it's quite a painting there beautiful and that she doesn't look at us means we can project anything we want onto her you can imagine Lodovico receiving this painting and just being astonished that indeed something lifeless could bring something so lifelike to his eyes the gestures their facial expression of both our watchful expectant and pure later on is Milan period he you know he spent a lot of time working on several different sculptures which do not come to fruition that is he makes a major model and doesn't isn't able to cast in bronze you'll hear more about that next week but then he spends much about end of the decade working on the world's most famous ruined painting and this is the Last Supper and he gets to a kind of completed point in the late 1490s and this is a tough tough painting it's hard to find a good image because indeed is so faint Leonardo did not like the constriction of the media he worked with he always wanted to try something new tried he wanted to have in the finished work of art all the flexibility that his own drawings and sketches afforded you know if he was making a design it didn't like it and I take another piece of paper he'd flip it over he right turn it sideways you see in the exhibition examples were the writing and the designs move around the page she keeps reworking things you can't do that with a finished work of art though you can't keep changing your mind or if you do you never get it done and one of the difficulties and was that he was fighting against the traditional way of covering walls that is making painting murals a mural as a wall painting to paint a mural you use the traditional technique of one fresco where you use fresh plaster fresco comes from the Italian word for fresh or cool and you're using fresh plaster which you put on the wall and you'd have one of your assistants or mason whatever make up the plaster and put it on the wall you put up a Jordan not tah Jordan oh is the Italian word for day and a buongiorno good day Oh Jordan ah tis a day's catch as much as you thought you could complete in that day and then you'd use the kind of pigments minerals granite minerals and kind of watercolor you put that into plaster before the plaster dried when the plaster dried a few hours later you make a makes a perfect chemical bond with the wall and that so a fresco is incredibly durable think of the Sistine Chapel or all those maze and frescoes throughout Florence covering walls of palaces and chapels and churches but a fresco is permanent the problem is if you've got a different kind of mind a scientific mind at tinkerers mind a doodler an inventor you want to keep making changes and so laying out a thought he had some new way of doing this was not going to dry patch by patch the cross of course of you know many months as he did the whole painting he wanted to go back and correct it and there are these very famous stories of his working practice how he beat somewhere else in town and then he would come all the way to this church there were factory that's the monks dining room of santa maria da da da this was going to be on one of the short walls of a big rectangular room above the tables where they would eat and he would come back and we'll get it for a little bit then leave again but hours later or the next day he might come back make a little change our stare at four hours again and come back leave it and go back and forth so very prolonged working practice something you can do with oil painting but something you can't do with fresco and so he tried various mixtures of oil and tempera in the plaster to give himself some flexibility and the problem was disastrously even within this lifetime to begin to flake artist descriptions of it in the 16th century so within a century of its making talk about how there's almost nothing there it's just a ruin and so you really have to look at this you know in with with more time we could look at some of the preparatory drawings so some of them were very close to this and they're also bronze by leonardo followers his pupils and other people in his circle who were copying things that they found his individual studies of gesture and expression so vivid they wanted to take them down so it's a big rectangular room the painted room that is that kind of matches that the painting itself in person if you've seen it it's bigger than on the screen it's quite large pickers are a little bigger than why sighs the room is three big windows in the end with a beautiful hazy landscape or so we assumed hard to see set down the walls interesting ly a little teeny nails here these would have been or intended to be depictions of tapestries that go back in a strong recession towards the kind of vanishing point in the back and even in this damaged State though you can see so much of Leonardo psychology he's taken a complex scene okay you've got 13 people on the table but he's divided up group of three here another group of three here another group of three and then three with Christ in the middle beautifully silhouetted we know from a copy that's made soon after the painting is done and before this door was punched right through in the wall disfiguring the painting that Christ's feet actually under the table overlapped just like Christ on the cross right there's one one nail through them so very kind of beautiful detail again the pyramidal composition but now it's really Christ at the center is our triangle there and they've got other triangles on the side and and this is a painting that has so much folded into it you can see well in a way I wanted to keep working on it again and again it's two moments simultaneously the first one is the moment of Revelation that one of his followers one of his disciples would betray him so they're all thanked is a tie is a tie you know their oneness and they're they sort of stand up in astonishment or push themselves back away from the table gesture but also if you Christ his mood by contrast is very calm he is also thinking about the other important event of the Last Supper which is the institution of the Eucharist the bread and the wine that was his body and his and his sacrifice so the Last Supper complicated painting unfund 'mentally extremely frustrating it probably looks better now at the end of a complicated multi-year restoration than it has for centuries but it's very hard to know what to say about it except that Leonardo put so much of himself into it that indeed he probably guaranteed a painting that would not survive he could not let go this by the way shows that 1944 after the aftermath of a bombing in World War two and the the church was somewhat damaged the refectory was totally damaged except for the two walls of the Leonardo painting and then the fresco on the other side so just amazing that these were sandbagged and not not destroyed you know it says it says you know something that despite its fragmentary condition that Leonardo's paintings you know had to be protected at all costs it seems someone was looking out for it he goes so not a very successful conclusion to his period in Milan though he does beautiful paintings like the portrait of tequila gala Ronnie and he's back in Florence or he's given this very prestigious commission to paint a battle scene ok the Battle of Anghiari which was a 1440 victory of Florence over Milan and remember Leonard just been working in Milan and he is from Florence he's now come back you know to his welcome home and he must have found irony delicious to talk about this victory of the Florentines over them this is not Leonardo this is a copy of the central section the so-called battle for the standard made by Rubens and so they're trying to grab the pole right there at the flagpole there and it's fascinating the work is lost it was only partially executed it seems and then later destroyed or covered up but but for several generations artists made copies of the surviving drawings or the section that Leonardo got done and this got done these got copied in turn and what Leonardo has done though these wonderful figures of horses he's looking for the moment of maximum energy greatest psychological tension greatest physical tension is in a way like a doctor trying to see what are the abilities of a human body how much weight can we take how fierce could fighting be how much noise can we imply in an otherwise of course silent painting so marvelous drawing right here and it gets at how exciting this painting must have been Leonardo's original um this these are just drawings of horses that we see up in the exhibition to remind us again of how important forces were to Leonardo and these are various drawings of screaming figures that he employed for the for the soldiers these are Leonardo's own preparatory drawings one on the Rights in Budapest where he has really tried to summarize someone shouting or screaming or wincing in pain again the scientists mind at work by contrast Michelangelo who's doing another wall in the same room does the Battle of Cascina but there's no battle at all this is rather the florentine the messenger runs in and tells the bathing soldiers that the battle is about to happen so Michelangelo it was his opportunity to show as many beautiful muscular figures as possible he was more interested in the variety one figure than actually the battle itself and indeed that he wanted to show his complete mastery of anatomy shows again a different mind at work this is now the room in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence or the Bloodless in the area completely covered up with later sixteenth century paintings on canvas by the sorry though their various people have proposed that if you look right underneath this we'll find parts of Leonardo's original I think that's doubtful so but when he's in Florence though the also paints probably the most famous portrait of all time portrait of Mona Lisa and just in just in a moment we don't you know have enough time but it's even hard to know when it was painted we give the date from giving it a date about 1502 onwards a protracted working process that you could do with an oil painting not though with the painting on a wall and first of course we need to remember that it's been cut down that the portrait of jenever de been she lost the bottom section this has been trimmed on both sides and you can see the little bumps there's a bump there and that those are the basis of columns okay little columns and if you have column here and then a shaft and indeed she's sitting in a kind of loggia right kind of a porch with amazing landscape behind you can't deny her monumental presence she is a big figure and now Leonardo has become so you contrast then this strong monumental figure she has a lot of grandeur with the SU motto this unbelievable very faint and imperceptible gradation from dark to light you see everywhere particular on the hand or on the sides of the face there is not made up of lines it's extraordinary it's indeed made up of extremely delicate brushstrokes that blend into nothingness we have to keep this in mind in fact that as Leonardo Buck has become a mature painter you cannot see any of these brushstrokes later artists right I think of Titian or Tintoretto or Rembrandt they like big strong brushstrokes it's a way of conveying their personality a strong brushstrokes or represented big zags or dots are a way of expressing themselves it's who they are it's how they make their mark Leonardo's paintings are important because he wanted in a way to efface his presence there's no sign that this is really a painting it's part his way of conveying illusion is to make as to have visit you know imperceptible brush strokes throughout everything is so fine as clearly not a painting he's implying indeed it is truth so there's a beautiful landscaping behind we've seen earlier versions of that in the Madonna of the rocks that there's a well-known asymmetry of her face you know that that and the whole model is to smile as in fact that her her this side the face the smile was up higher than there which to the other side which conveys a sense of mystery there's a mysteriousness there and you know we are very a symmetrical interfaces and this really conveys that so many figures you know the eyes the mouth are done as if they're mirror images which they're not and Leonardo through his scientific attitude and his way every strong perception at the you know observing the world as closely as possible seizes upon things like this it's also mostly monochromatic now like the other painting of the Lube that we saw a few minutes ago the Virgin the rocks this is also under a very thick coating of varnish so it's hard to see but you can note that there's a beautiful kind of a yellowish sleeves here with beautiful folds and the ways the echoes of the folds of the of the sleeves here right under forearms echo the forms of our hands beautiful sense that kind of stripes or hatching there's a rhythm there that is extremely beautiful and of course you look at a portrait like this and you think of a psychological depth the same way that even a figure without strong movement which play now to love to depict can express something of the inner mind and I'd like to have the last slide be an odd one which is a painting of Saint John the Baptist and there's a lot of thought that this was done by Leonardo Leonardo follower or that is kind of lost this touch this is last few years of his life and it shows John the Baptist not baptized in Christ but rather pointing up that is you know looking up to God and what's funny about it though it's really striking is that he's implying no strong relationship with the viewer and there's a lost painting of Leonardo which is known some copies but it must have been amazing it's got this kind of directness and the figure comparin would have been coming out of this darkness really kind of kind of a costing us in a very mysterious and dramatic way but this was a lost Annunciation without a Virgin Mary it was only apparently the angel the angel coming right at us and speaking to us as if we are the Virgin Mary direct address right at us so extraordinary painting and in a way this shows a long-term idea of Leonardo's trying to figure out new ways not just to depict details or the rhythm sort of compositional rhythms but also trying to involve the viewer as well in this explorations of psychology this painting it and we don't have a ladder at the unite the MFA but upstairs right off the scopes record or as you head into the mirror can wing on the Huntington side we could beautiful painting by one of his followers and I think it's important to end a talk about Leonardo the painter realizing and effect but many of his paintings which don't survive many of his ideas were then imparted to his pupils he was so influential that when he gets the milan all the pages they're immediately stopped doing what they're doing and start painting leonardo style paintings he felt bad for you know the previous generation but that's what they do and we have you see a lot of the things I've been talking about right it'd be a little twist in the body of the the head the neck of Salome wonderful details strong sense of somato that is the imperceptible brushwork the very soft gradations from dark to light to model the figures in three dimensions you have amazing contrast in this beautiful face of John the Baptist which just been severed so you've got beauty and horror and the same and indeed there's a psychological dimension because this painting by layin hours people Louie knee it's also understanding she's turning her head away and but she's the one that danced at Herod's banquet it was asked what she wanted for being such a sensual dance she said I want the head of John the Baptist on a platter indeed she had felt wronged and insulted by him but now she's realizing that she turns her head indeed that she's confronted by this horrific beauty of the severed head at the moment of conversion she's changing her mind and that's the kind of psychological thing that Leonardo would have imparted in all of his followers in Milan now we can find conclude really that something very frustrating about looking at him as a painter many examples aren't really by him we're looking at copies or indeed we're looking at damaged works you could find this depressing or even confusing but at least during the extent of the exhibition upstairs I urge you to go back again and again with Leonor's own scientific and inquisitive sense of mind and appreciate what we have in this building thank [Applause] I'd be happy to take some questions and I can also take questions down below if you want to ask me individually any off there give a question please raise your hand and we'll bring the microphone to you oh good when we come to a portrait of Cecilia we didn't talk about her hair but it was very confusion was it her hair or was it a cap and what was that thing across yeah well she's kind of wearing a band across her head and it's I mean I've seen this painting in person once it happened to be an exhibition in Spain but yeah no she's clearly very much done up she's wearing sleeves that are slashed she's got complicated jewelry several different things and I think it's you know her hair's kind of pulled back in a very tight kind of bun and then there seems to be yes something under her chin which is attached on top and then a kind of band in front with a very I think it's a very thin gauzy kind of fabric to keep it all together but but it's a tequila gala Ronnie um I mean she's been very much done up and she's being posed and part of the delight in her is that she has been so sort of turned out opposite of what we would find maybe appealing which is a sense of naturalism and and freedom and and you know allowing to let our own personally be expressed the this is very much a painting commissioned by by her boyfriend so else can you identify Judas in the Last Supper or any of the other apostles yeah well I mean that all of them have been given names and the idea is that this figure here that shrinking back is Judas they've all been assigned names for the various apostles and the point being is that while other ones are sort of gesticulating around Judas in fact shrinks back and the point in the gospel is that Christ says whoever puts her hand in the salt a dip its hand in the salt gives us gives it away and so he's realized that he's with all the still life elements on the table he's doing that the most striking figure here is this one here in red who's Amelie the Christ's right with a reddish hair let's go back to the so that would be the Judas figure this figure right here has been thought erroneously by Dan Brown in The DaVinci Code again again which DaVinci is not a last name that this must be Mary must be Mary Magdalene cause it's a woman well you know you just look at teenagers today and you know that long hair is no indication of male or female and indeed this is John the Evangelist who is the disciple of Christ most loved who's the youngest one looks feminine because he's the youngest he doesn't have a beard right he's like sixteen or something and it's not a female it's not Mary Magdalene in earlier representations in Leonardo the figures often leaning against Christ right Leah so overcome with the bad news that he wants to cry there but but there are again even in this fragmentary painting st. celebrate here beautiful details each of them reacting in their own way to the news as they absorb in all this information I would be pleased to talk about the Last Supper with you another time because we can pull out a book and show you a whole lot of things it's a very complicated question another one middle oh that's that okay and that's that's a whole nother question because you're bringing not just painting but physiognomies and you know there are a number of drawings thought to be of Leonardo so couple months of self-portraits there's one in the exhibition suppose you know that there's a face placed which I don't think is particularly persuasive in in the Codex on the flight of birds it's definitely a face of an older man is that Leonardo at 50 who knows I mean the tantalizing thing about Leonardo I mean first you know he famously said that every painter paints himself right I mean no matter you're painting you're bringing something of yourself into it and and this comes down through our history but the tantalizing thing is that Leonardo was described by all of his contemporaries as being incredibly good-looking he was all these amazing physical attributes right he could apparently bend to iearn right a bar of iron he's super strong Bruins in many ways and just super handsome apparently as well and there is but the only depictions we have secure ones we say are these ones showing with a much older man either maybe a self-portrait or one by his assistants and so I don't really want to weigh on on anything except to say that if you see you know these beautiful flowing locks and sort of you know strong features those are either Leonardo himself or what he wish he look like or thought you did and all the pictures of his various duty apprentices of whom he was very fond he liked to surround himself like really handsome young man so that was that was part of it but I think if you Leonardo you can do what you want in titles one more in the back I think it's fun the first virgin of the rocks-- it says that it was oil on wood transferred to canvas what does that mean okay now that's a good question oil on you know wood transferred to canvas in the almost all artists in the 15th century and then starting on 1500 particularly in Venice and then spreading to other places artists begin to paint on canvas canvas is cheaper it's lighter you can roll it up that's anything but but in places like Florence that kept working on wood and Leonardo would have learned to paint on wood as a young artist and would just like to think of something like them you know antique table a dining room table that's what it's a very smooth and polished surface it affords a huge amount of detail right it's so smooth nothing there's no texture getting away and so things are paint on wood and it suited Leonardo's evolving style beautifully that is a huge amount of detail invisible brushstrokes and the Zoom Otto effects you couldn't do on a canvas that just be too much texture to get in the way the problem is in the 19th century and early 20th century people thought oh ha would that changes in some different quality mid ities goes from dry to humid to dry again things can split just think how antique furniture can split when the central heating goes on well the idea was that if a painting is on a wood panel and you move it from kind of kind of drier climate to a wetter one or wetter to drive the wood will warp and affect the painting on top so the idea was to basically peel off the top layer of the wood and put it on a canvas support not always done successfully but but it was done frequently and particular with it was very important highly rare painting we don't do that anymore the idea is that it's that keep it on a wooden panel you try to have climate control so that any change in temperature or humidity happens gradually you know over days or weeks rather than hours and that seems to be a better thing but but for the 19th century and early may be first third of the 20th century the idea is that a wooden panel will be inherently more vulnerable than something on canvas because canvas can sort of breathe in a sense it can expand and contract and so the idea was to get it off of the wooden panel and is kind of nail-biting operation just just sort of sort of peel off that top layer the paint layer the gesso which is a preparatory plaster layer and then presumably just the top of the wood or maybe another wood and then put that on a new ostensibly more stable support so but you can hear my voice even talking about it makes me nervous so I'm glad that conservation moved along in that last century anyway thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 82,241

Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci, leonardo, painting, renaissance, renaissance art, art history, art class, art lecture, art course, italian art, european art

Id: YcLqoVRDPqw

Length: 80min 46sec (4846 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017